Some of the defining moments of the post-COVID-19 era have been the sparring matches between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul. Perhaps the most famous of these exchanges was during a 2021 congressional hearing.
“Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11 where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?” Paul asked at the 2021 hearing.
“Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function … and Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci retorted.
This issue of gain-of-function research and the various federal agencies that fund pathogen research has since been a priority for Paul. Later this summer he will reveal legislation intended to decrease the likelihood of future pandemics by increasing regulation around pathogen research. The bill also aims to disconnect the people funding research from those overseeing the research so the U.S. can better respond to future pandemics.
“The main thing is control needs to be outside of the hands of the people receiving or dispensing grant money. It’s too tight of a web there, and it’s too much self-policing,” Paul told RCP in an interview last week.
In the interview, he specifically referenced that organizations such as the National Institutes of Health not only played a part in funding research on pathogens in the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the EcoHealth Alliance but also played a role in the pandemic response. This response included Francis Collins, director of the NIH from 2009 through December 2021, asking about how the NIH can “put down” the theory that COVID-19 was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At a “Fund for American Studies” event with Sen. Paul on Tuesday, June 18, Richard Ebright, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers, outlined that the legislation Paul is drafting would take the oversight of the research away from the people doing the research: “The second most important change is to have legislation so that the oversight, the regulation, is taken away from the agencies that perform research and fund research themselves, all of which have a built-in conflict of interest and instead given to a new agency, that does not perform or fund research.”
The first part of the legislation, Ebright said, is to create specific federal regulations for pathogen research. “Right now in the United States, for biosafety, there are no rules with force of law for any pathogen other than the smallpox virus,” he said. “If you wanted to start research in your garage on SARS-CoV-2, and you wanted to produce swimming pools full of the virus, you could do so without informing anyone, without requesting permission from anyone, and with no possibility of penalty.” As for making pathogen research safer, he says, “The single most important change is to have legislation which establishes regulation, federal regulation of this crucial and existentially risky area of research that has the force of law, and therefore is enforceable.”
The third part of the legislation, Ebright said, will ensure that the oversight covers all forms of research, including classified and unclassified research, as well as private and publicly funded research.
“Senator Paul has begun drafting legislation that will put these three key elements in place, and this is something that everyone in this room, at least all of you who don’t want to see a next pandemic this decade, should support,” Ebright finished.
Paul also told RCP he believes that U.S. funding of pathogen and gain-of-function research should “probably not be in China at all. And if we’re doing it here, there needs to be a significant assessment of the risks.”
The Impetus for Legislation: Lab Leak Theory
Paul believes that the lab leak theory is the likely explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Steven Quay, CEO of Atossa Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, said alongside Paul at the event Tuesday that different molecular parts of the virus point to the fact that it was manipulated in a lab.
The main example they gave is the furin cleavage site, which Quay said originated from the animal kingdom but has been added by scientists in the past to other viruses. However, Quay said that of the 800-1400 other variations of coronaviruses in the “SARS-2 family” that have been researched, “none of these viruses have ever had a furin cleavage site.” He said that since no other version has this furin cleavage site, “the probability that this came from nature is under 1%, under .5%.”
Paul referenced other aspects of the virus that made it less likely to be a pathogen from nature: “It turns out that the sequence, the codons, which is the DNA that codes for the amino acids, that code is one they commonly use in labs, that laboratory people commonly use to insert furin cleavage sites. It’s not as common in the animal kingdom.”
Given the different aspects of the virus that he mentioned, Quay said that there was a “1 in 1.2 billion” chance that it came from nature. Paul clarified that he wasn’t certain about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 but said the “odds are pretty long that it didn’t” come from animals and instead came from a lab.
The origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain disputed. Earlier this month, in his first public testimony since he left the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2022, Fauci testified in a hearing before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and told Congress there still isn’t definitive proof for or against the “Lab Leak” theory: “I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will readily accept it.”
The most recent assessment from the intelligence community on the origins of the virus also contains this uncertainty, outlining that some agencies found that the virus came through a “laboratory-associated incident,” while others found that the initial human infection of the virus was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal.
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